Caltrops - Gamerasutra - update: it's okay

Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra

by FABIO 07/12/2006, 10:32pm PDT

Once you get past the stupid graphic design changes it's an okay new addition to the series. Seriously though, whoever thought the new city look and building flowchart were good ideas needs to be fired. It's like they hired the retarded Office Space efficiency expert hatchet men. "So, easy to look at and understand city screen, what do you do here? *shrug*" "Ditch it! My power point flowchart is so much more EFFICIENT!"

But actually, it's not. They fire the long time workers who could get the job done and replaced it with something that looked better on paper, but in reality is some phone tech from Singapore whose accent is so bad you can't tell what buildings he's talking about.

Half of the building icons look like castle turrets or wall sections. Is this wall section a griffon tower, archer tower, or stable? Who knows, they all look the fucking same. The rest of the buildings are scattered square blocks. Even worse, they can't even organize the icons according to type, which I thought was the whole point of efficient charts? Taverns, resource silos, blacksmiths, they're all mixed in with unit producing buildings. The only thing they managed correctly was putting all levels of town hall upgrades on the far left column. It's like they started out knowing what they were doing, but miscommunication from outsourced development teams garbled the final results.

ANYWAYS, all the typical HoMM stuff is there. The best thing that I can say about this game is that they got rid of all the crap that ruined the fourth game, which makes it what 4 should have been, but with more unnecessary 3D replacing the perfectly fine 2D sprites.

Things I like:

-The order of turn bar showing in combat tells you when everyone gets to go

-Being able to auto-resolve combat then manually redoing it if you dont like the results. Why hasn't every auto combat game done this yet? The computer isn't half bad at auto combat either, though you'll probably want to replay some of them to get better RESULTS.

-Being able to train your units up a tier. This is theoretically nice and useful, but the game's idea of which units are "higher up" than the others is questionable. Footmen/squires suck, so let's pony over fifty thousand gold to turning a bunch of useful marksmen into shitty footmen. It's also the primary "unique" ability of the human faction, which makes them suck compared to the other factions which actually get a useful ability. Oops, I guess this should have gone in the negative section (or call it part of my brilliant jumbled chart scheme).

-Realizing that their plot is a crappy, exact, point by point ripoff of Warcraft 3 (they couldnt even think of a new look for the prince who tries to save his kingdom from evil, but ends up turning into a leader of the undead to destroy it, so they just made him an Arthus clone), which in turn is the most jumbled, contrived, and flat out stupid fantasy plot ever made. So I guess they decided to spare you the plot by titling and giving a short description to each level you can look at ahead of time. Each description spells out exactly what's going to happen so you don't have to bother. "Level 4- The Betrayal, Level 5- The King dies". But if you've played Warcraft 3 then you already know what's going to happen. Even dumb plot twists and betrayal that aren't ripped off from Warcraft 3 can be seen miles away. The queen's nurse shows up right after demons ambushed me, hmmmmmmmm.

Things I don't like:

-Would be nice if it let you know the relative strengths of the units. Is this random creature going to kick my ass or not?

-Horrible campaign so far. Half the levels are "set amount of units" puzzle maps, the rest give you a single city of your type, and you dont even get to face off against enemy heroes until many hours in. You're stuck fighting random wandering monsters most of the time. It's supposed to be a tutorial, but the pace at which is doles out info to you is painfully slow.

-The stupid tavern tips. For a small amount of gold you can pay a tavern keeper to give you tooltip game hints on how to play. Stuff that should have been in the manual but isn't, explaining many things that aren't clear. Why do I have to pay in-game currency just to learn the rules? I just start a game, build up a bunch of gold, then buy every tip I can then reload. Absolutely, inexcusably retarded.

-Initiative changing from determining who goes first (but once) every turn to "faster units get to go more often". Remember how speed was by far the most impostant stat in Final Fantasy Tactics? This makes certain units in the game near useless. Fast flying and mounted units? By far the most important since they get to go 2-3 times more than everyone else. Those slow, but powerful once they close the distance melee units? Crap since they're all dead before they can get two turns in. Zombies? Golems? Completely, utterly useless as you watch them die to units who can move 3 times as fast and take turns five times as often. You might as well not even bother at all with slow units; since they also slow you down on the adventure map in addition to being worthless in combat. So great now one or two units on every side isn't even worth getting. A good rule of thumb is that if it's a melee unit that doesn't fly or move around on four legs, ditch it.

I can't say for certain yet, but since the hero can only act during his turn (instead of just casting a spell at any time once per turn) and his turns come up so far apart, that magic casting heroes are vastly inferior to fighter heroes that just sit back and give their army passive army/defense bonuses, so score another point for the new intiative system.